The Biggest Opportunity Of Our Lifetime: Speaking Of Collapse Resilience … The Unequivocal Voice Of Data … Sunday Thoughts
Edition 26 | August 2024
My latest Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter ‚Sustainability Officers and Experts feeling the heat of collapse … how to react‘ has clearly been the most read one in a long time. I received a ton of private messages (and a few public responses) from people in the sustainability field expressing their personal pressures and how much they suffer by the workload and complexity they’re now facing. They are concerned about a set of standards delivering an – my words – interoperability myth, just serving the standard setters, but not the reporters. Thousands of pages of standards, guidance documents, Q&A brochures, comparability matrixes and interpretations, an unbearable mass of nothing but compliance and – again my words – collapse documentation. Many also can’t grasp the literal siege by ESG consultancies offering expensive services that promise deliver on that compliance. Sustainability, well that’s something different. Many said ‘that’s not why I stepped into sustainability in the first place, but now I am required to comply with the regulation, how much should I let go of my own vision?’
Others, also in public, criticised that I’m actually not throwing a lifeline to the CSOs and other sustainability experts, not giving them a pep talk, but actually would argue to give up. Really, is that what I wrote?
Let me put that into context: we’re in overshoot of ‘carrying’ capacities and undershoot of ‘caring’ capacities for 50+ years. We’re reaching irreversible culmination points. Nature cries havoc, it’s on the news every day. Governments, financial markets, big NGOs (under corporate strait jackets) and corporates deliver no vision, just curing symptoms, many of them cocoon and even move backwards (also known as the ‘ESG backlash’). Incremental sustainability reporting delivers literally nothing for true sustainability. In that situation I recommended the use of the UN Sustainable Performance Indicators as the only ‘authentic’ way to measure ‘real’ sustainability, or for the sake of ALL industries, the true level of non-sustainability (because that’s simply the reality, and why not saying it to at least create a new baseline of honesty).
Not shying away from that is not a heroic act, it’s a moral duty. And still, obfuscation with the exiting standards like ESRS, ISS and/or GRI seems to have the preference, while the UNSDPI are compatible, and offer the ONLY objective way of defining materiality, and reduce risk and greenwashing litigation potential. Tell me how that is NOT throwing a lifeline, at least for the short-term.
For the mid- to long term, collapse will take its toll. For too long the construct of the CSO, the sustainability department, or the separate service line in consultancies, called ‚ESG Services‘, offered an illusion of progress. In a collapse situation, concentrating responsibility at that one place and expecting it to inspire all others to finally become sustainable, won’t succeed, it can’t succeed! This is not a question of budget, staffing or positioning, it’s an impossibility by design. No industry is and will become sustainable in a timeframe in which we still have wiggle room. The climate clock (www.climateclock.world) tells us we have
as of today to stay within a carbon budget of 1.5 degrees, while we are for 15 months in a row in a new lift of monthly climate records, at 1.64 degrees and moving upwards, while we are evenly busy to kill more and more of the buffer capacity for sequestering CO2 in the oceans (ocean warming and acidification) and on land (soil erosion, deforestation and biodiversity diminishing).
The excuses are manyfold to drastically adapt in a completely unsustainable economic system design (no or not enough commitment, time, staff, market willingness, customer willingness, supplier conformity, fierce competition, unfit regulation, or in short ‘the business case for sustainability’). Simply put, being truly sustainable is a first mover disadvantage, being sustainable is nearly impossible in that environment. In consequence, the job of being a CSO or sustainability expert will become more painful and blameful by the day. To throw a lifeline by saying ‚if you want to break through, you need to break out‘ is a consideration for all feeling the impossibility presented with their job description. I am the best example what this means, with all the consequences. I can say today I feel much better over here, where new markets are starting to come into existence and working pre-competitively is a real joy. It really is!
This why I’d like to use even more space in this Lighthouse Keeper edition to look at the alternatives, and while many are not yet wide spread, or are in their infancy, or still need more investigation, they are simply …
The Biggest Opportunity Of Our Lifetime: Speaking Of Collapse Resilience
I’d like to use the opportunity of our upcoming 11th International r3.0 Online Conference to frame and explain the opportunities we see for all of us if we’d follow the logic of collapse resilience. As mentioned various times in posts and podcasts, the collapse resilience focus is the result of a mourning process from collapse awareness to collapse acknowledgement to arrive at collapse resilience as the only remaining option that has a promising chance of delivering for as many as possible (unfortunately not all), in full realisation that collapse avoidance now is a lost opportunity (look at the next chapter below), we missed those marks in the last decade. The datasets are clear, the mental realisation in corporations, politics, philanthropy, NGO environments, and the general public lesser so.
If we look at the opportunities for collapse resilience, I’d like to start from last year’s 10th International r3.0 Conference, in which we focussed on the opportunities of positive social tipping points. At that point we also announced our repositioning towards collapse resilience. In the design of the 2023 conference we consciously took a ‘margin-centered’approach, drawing on the wisdom of communities that are pushed to the edges (tapping into the ‘abundant edge effects’ Principle of Regenerative Vitality), and Joanna Macy’s call for ‘Active Hope’ — in other words, not blind faith, but rather trust in the actions we take together to tackle our predicaments. One important aspect of this is the ability to collectively grieve what’s dying, killed off by humanity’s status quo systems (an economic systems predicated on perpetual growth and institutions that entrench this status quo) as inspiration to nurture the birth of new ways of being. As working together in solidarity is the only way for humanity to navigate through the predicament we’ve created for ourselves, we explored ways to connect to create the change necessary to heal the harms that are embedded in many of our systems, by activating new social norms that restore balance in humans’ relationships with each other and with nature. We looked at and listened to the concepts of Restorative Economics, Indigenous and Global Majority World voices, Common Good Governance, and Prosocial Norms. We received many enthusiastic responses after the conference, and the many great speakers – many of them you never see in professional corporate conference setups, were spreading sparkles of that ‘Active Hope’.
This year’s conference on September 10/11 now takes us a step further into several intervention areas in which we think essential work needs to be done, so please feel drawn into these areas, all under the heading ‘Tipping Points On Tipping Points – Building Necessary Collapse Resilience.’ What are these and how do they instigate meaningful work packages for devoted sustainability experts:
- the potential to trigger positive tipping points for rapid transformation to social norms that reinforce earth system stability and social system resilience. Work is needed for more reality checks on the degree to which positive tipping points in social systems can possibly achieve commensurability with negative tipping points in ecological and social systems. Here’s how 4 world leading experts tackle this topic:
Jem Bendell will draw on his Breaking Togetherbook to ground the dialogue in the context of ongoing collapse, in particular introducing a reality check on the degree to which positive tipping points in social systems can possibly achieve commensurability with negative tipping points in ecological and social systems.
Avit Bhowmik will be setting foundations on tipping points research, drawing on his role as co-author of several chapters of the Global Tipping Points report (Negative social tipping points and Understanding and acting on positive tipping points among others).
Karen O’Brien will build on this by sharing her research on activating transformations to sustainability through Fractal Agency, applying empowerment across Three Spheres of Transformation (and mapped to Avit’s Powers of 10 Fractal Framework, which identifies Sweet Spots for transformative climate action).
Chidi Oti Obihara will anchor the dialogue in personal examples of social tipping points, drawing on his own conversion experience to the Green Party, his work advocating for fossil fuel phase-out (before its broader embrace by the International Energy Agency and COP28), and reflections on potential future positive social tipping points.
- the complete reset towards place-based engagement, specifically at the nested scales of municipalities and bioregions, as these represent the most promising contexts for navigating collapse with resilience. What are the systemic innovations that communities are seeding to ruggedize in the context of increasing complexity and potential crashes. Here are four ways to be involved in that area of intervention:
Ting Pan presents the storyof how the City of Nanaimo in Canada drafted a sustainability Monitoring Strategy by first developing indicators following the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) guidance, only to find them devoid of thresholds, prompting the team to shift to a context-based approach to developing thresholds-based performance indicators.
Alison Shaw works with municipalities in Canada, implementing low carbon resilience (LCR), which augments mitigation with adaptation strategies and thereby also opens the door to broader systemic interventions — including thresholds-based assessment.
Belén Páez is leading the development and implementation of the Sacred Amazon Headwaters Bioregional Plan 2030, which represents perhaps the most robust long-term bioregional strategy globally, which importantly asserts indigenous stewardship as a strategic imperative for achieving justice and regeneration.
Samantha Power recently published Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFF) report, which provides a blueprint for intermediating resource flows to support on-the-ground regenerative work at the bioregional scale.
- A clear focus on just transitions to regenerative economies & cultures. What work is necessary to lead the visioning of new economies and the evolution of cultures, necessary to spur the emergence of regeneration and flourishing.Howthis can be done is something we can learn from:
Gaya Herrington researched the historical contextualization focused on the 1972 Club of Rome Limits to Growth report, whose computer model (World3) she re-ran recently, demonstrating how the LtGprojections have closely tracked real-world outcomes that validate its “overshoot & collapse” diagnosis of the dead end pathway of perpetual growth upon which capitalism is predicated.
Jayati Ghosh worked on the Earth4Allresearch, supported by the Club of Rome (and others), exploring 2 scenarios (Giant Leap and Too Little Too Late) that require a handful of major ‘turnarounds’ to avert the worst outcomes: eliminating poverty, reducing inequality, empowering women, transforming food systems, transforming energy systems, and upgrading our economic system (Ghosh will focus on the first two.)
Emily Kawano works for the Center for Popular Economics’, having developed a five-pronged definition of capitalismto bridge to the enlivening alternative of the Solidarity Economy, which encompasses a diversity of approaches to building a global post-capitalist culture dedicated to participatory democracy, equity in all dimensions, sustainability, and pluralism.
Sahana Chattapadhyay worked on the scoping out to a pluriversalist cultural consciousness that transcends the Eurocentric hegemonic colonialist culturethat currently predominates, thereby mapping just transitions into truly regenerative economies and cultures.
- counteracting overshoot, respecting the ‘carrying’ and ‘caring’ capacities of ecological and social systems in our collective commons. Thresholds approximate where systems transgress their carrying and caring capacities and so enter the danger zone where tipping points can be crossed at any moment, triggering systemic collapses. Allocations require all actors to take accountability for their fair share responsibility of respecting systemic carrying and caringcapacities. This essential logic can be seen in the work of these four leading experts:
Mathis Wackernagel, an instigator of the Ecological Footprint, which established the thresholds & allocations approach in the 1990s. They serve as a foundation for asserting the competitive advantage of respecting thresholds as a 21st Century operating environment imperative – that also happens to align with the collective action imperative of exiting overshoot.
Fatima Dentonworks with the Global Commons Alliance’s Earth Commission (which she co-chairs), including one study that identifies 11 allocation approaches and proposes a general framework for applying allocations, and another study that proposes a shift from a Global Commons to a Planetary Commons Framework, distinguished by its integration of carrying capacity thresholds into earth system governance (ESG) regimes.
Katharina Herzogleads money:care, that assessed 200 companies against the United Nations Sustainable Development Performance Indicators (UNSDPIs), finding performance falling far short of the half-way mark of sustainability thresholds. They are updating their findings from the original 2023 research.
Mahlet Getachew worked on thresholds & allocations to include them in the Business Standards for 21st Century Leadership that the Corporate Racial Equity Alliance is developing (currently in a public consultation draft). Theyintegrate key elements of thresholds & allocations such as duties & obligations and context-based materiality.
All of these intervention areas and actions will find their place in the setup of a regenerative & distributive, hence restorative, economic system design, after the collapse of the current exploitative, colonialist and racist economic system has ceased. We are in the middle of a ‘hospicing & midwifing’ process. There are more than these 4 essential intervention areas, and here’s where r3.0 will also contribute to through its own repositioning as a ‘coherence creator in the context of collapse’, currently taking shape in great pace. Essential grounding will be established through the work on the forthcoming ‘Blueprint ZERO – Just Transitions to Regenerative Economies & Cultures’.
I’ve presented all these intervention areas to trigger further individual thought processes for sustainability experts, allowing to go back to the essence of what we’d need to achieve together, while old paradigms are vanishing. There’s so much market-making potential that it’s hard to grasp, just think about the wrong logic of nation state boundaries, world-spanning currencies, the logic of ownership, of power structures, globalization in general, and many more aspects of the current madness. I’d say if you feel called to immerse yourself in any of these areas, don’t let risk-aversion be your biggest enemy. As Thomas Friedman said: ‘We need to move from “the necessary is impossible” to ‘the impossible is necessary”.
The Unequivocal Voice of Data
I very often address the inevitability of our economic system collapse, and base it on the clarity of the datasets I look at. Earlier Lighthouse Keeper editions often listed the reports, studies and databases I was/am drawing conclusions from. Here’s a set of new information that keep me believing in that inevitability. But as always, I am not tired to repeat that this is not the apocalypse, but simply a radical shift of the life and logic as we knew it, especially in the Western/Northern hemisphere. And at the same time we need to understand this situation as an opportunity, it seems we need collapse to finally come to grips and overthrow the many obstacles that keep us going today, without doing ‘the impossible’.
This article in the Guardian is one of the latest summaries of what climate scientists now wrestle with: ‘We should have better answers by now: climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating’. ‘This is wreaking havoc over an even wider swath of the world by intensifying forest fires, droughts, floods, sea-ice loss and other manifestations of extreme weather.’
Johan Rockström from PIK in his latest TED talk from July 2024 takes it further by also looking at the additional consequences, called ‘Tipping Points of Climate Change’. In this talk he mentions that we not only cause climate change, but also causing domino effects by cascading effects on 16 major Earth tipping elements, including further ocean acidification, melting ice sheets and deforestration, especially in the Amazon Rainforest, which he considers losing the carbon sink ability, but tipping to become an emitter, a situation we are very close to in his view. It’s a catastrophic consequence of humans also destroying the buffering capacity of these Earth tipping elements which still absorb 53% of human-caused CO2 emission. He also mentions we’re losing minimally 18% of global GDP by 2050 ($38 trillion/year) if current trends continue, and that’s of course only a conservative estimate…depending on the cascading effects it could be much more.
Current effects are dreadful already. In this article called ‘Heat aggravated by carbon pollution killed 50,000 in Europe last year – study’ and mentions ‘hot weather inflamed by carbon pollution killed nearly 50,000 people in Europe last year, with the continent warming at a much faster rate than other parts of the world, leading to fires, drought and health problems, doctors call heat a “silent killer” because it claims far more lives than most people realise. The devastating mortality rate in 2023 would have been 80% higher if people had not adapted to rising temperatures over the past two decades, according to the study published in Nature Medicine.’ And that’s only Europe, how much more devastating is this in the Global South/Global Majority regions, where temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius meet humans with much lesser capacity to adapt.
At the same time we get reports that a ‘Massive disinformation campaign is slowing global transition to green energy.’ The UN says ‘a global ‘backlash’ against climate action is being stoked by fossil fuel companies, so that countries will slow down the adoption of renewable energy and the speed with which they “transition away” from a carbon-intensive economy.’
Also, we see global corporations massively turn their backs at earlier made sustainability commitments and lay off parts or the complete sustainability department. We heard of Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, Nike, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé, Shell, Air New Zealand, Moody’s, and many more. And if anybody wants to be tortured by more climate stupidity talk, go find the telcon between Trump and Elon Musk from last week (no link from me to further spread that utter nonsense).
I’ll leave this chapter here with a quote from Buckminster Fuller that I used in my Sunday Thought #106, simply because I start to more and more believe that his considerations and timelines may be in good range to reality:
‘It‘ll take 50 years [to 2026!] for us to realize that our institutions are rooted in an inaccurate understanding of the world. And they will become so dysfunctional in 50 years that we cannot fix them. We will not be able to repair them. We will not be able to prop them up any longer. They will disintegrate before our very eyes. And that’s when we will need to reinvent, recreate new institutions for the human family that are rooted in the truth of the more accurate understanding of the world, the context of sufficiency.’ (Buckminster Fuller)
Recent Sunday Thoughts
Please find the links to those Sunday Thoughts that got published after my latest Lighthouse Keeper Edition. May they inspire, clarify, and lead to thinking about third ways, as they do exist:
A Sunday Thought (#106): ‚2026‘ – according to Buckminster Fuller (August 18, 2024)
A Sunday Thought (#105): ‚Shot in the foot‘ – Johan Rockström‘s biggest fears (August 11, 2024)
A Sunday Thought (#104): Earth Overshoot Day – a mirror of human undershoot (August 4,2024)
A Sunday Thought (#103): ‘Code Black’ – As Code Red Is Not Enough Anymore (July 28, 2024)
A Sunday Thought (#102): ‚Antithetical States‘ – the collapsing and the hopeful present (July 21, 2024)
A Sunday Thought (#101): ‘Scapegoats’ – the hard life of acting as a referee (July 14, 2024)
A Sunday Thought (#100): ‘The Power Of A Single Thought’ – Sensemaking One Step At A Time (July 7, 2024)
A Sunday Thought (#99): ‘The tick system’ – our societal Lyme disease (June 30, 2024)
A Sunday Thought (#98): ‘When Time Stands Still’ – moments in nature! (June 23, 2024)
Have a good rest of your summer/winter, wherever you are, and hopefully will see many of you at the r3.0 (Online) Conference on September 10/11. Tickets are available at www.conference2024.r3-0.org.